Two Car Books

by Weston Cutter

What follow is a pair of reviews I should’ve done long, long ago, but I’m a terrible person, so there’s that to daily contend with. Elsewhere: a poem of mine in the latest issue of Witness, and plenty of other stuff over at the Kenyon Review Blog (which is where lots of what’d otherwise be here at Corduroy are—for instance, reviews of the absolutely incredible HHhH by Laurent Binet, a review of the latest Jorie Graham [short version: it's very very good], and reviews of  Kevin Young’s incredible Gray Album, the recent/posthumous John Leonard, and the collected Gilbert [which I should've made a bigger deal about and mentioned here as well, because holy shit, right? Gilbert's collected? That's like magic; you should buy the thing automatically, even if you hate Gilbert (though if you do, wtf?), just because you can finally have your own copy of the first two books), and also a review over at Rain Taxi as well.

 

American Icon by Bruce G Hoffman

Until recently I'd owned only one car in my entire life, the vehicle I've been driving for the past 12 years now, which vehicle is a '91 Ford Ranger, and which vehicle will soon die and I'll be just bereft, inconsolable (215k miles, fyi). Growing up, my family seemed more GM people, or at least my mother was, and so getting the keys from my grandpa to the truck was strange—the keys were different than any I'd handled. This stuff isn't necessarily crucial, other than to say: I became, because of my grandpa, a very very big Ford supporter, and it was fucking heartbreaking to watch them suck so terribly for so long, and it's been pretty thrilling to watch them turn around (you may have read, for instance, that this past week they got the blue oval back; yes, they actually had to leverage their own icon to continue).

            American Icon is the story of Ford's turnaround, which means it's also the story of Alan Mulally, a former Boeing exec who stepped to Ford's helm after Ford'd spent years with shit leadership (and not just shit leadership, but actively bad leadership, leadership which seemed to guarantee the company's fracturing and dismality...but of course in the late 90's and early 2000's, when the American Dream had to arrive with an SUV for every family, Ford was the biggest benefactor of our automotive idiocy, though despite that, they made mostly terrible cars [if you're really interested in this stuff, check the phenomenal CNBC documentary on Ford as well]). It’s a brisk read, written incredibly well by Bryce Hoffman, a writer who’s been covering the Ford Motor Company since ’05 for the Detroit News, and you will, if you’re like me, find that your reasons for liking Ford are totally validated. Yes: it’s sucky that their best stuff still doesn’t quite match the best stuff from other companies (but then again, it’s batshit that Mazda’s a losing-money enterprise when they’ve got arguably the best cars on the road, so), but I’m at least excited to be able to think about buying a Ford again. The book’s a great, great read.

Hack by Dmitry Samarov

I found this book very strange. On the one hand, it was instantly, pleasantly readable, and quick—one finishes it in maybe two hours. On the other hand, the book was, is, little more than Samarov’s gathered thoughts on being a cabbie in Chicago. That’s not a bad thing, obviously, but Samarov is one bleak and dour man—no one in this book is purely good. The kind way to say what Samarov is doing is: he’s casting a wry eye on the human comedy and condition. The mean way: he’s a prick who so doubts humanity that he can’t believe anyone would every ask him about himself out of authentic regard; everyone who gets in his cab, everyone everywhere, has a 100% selfish agenda, and that’s that. Maybe not: maybe Samarov’s a nice enough guy and he’s chosen to slice off this caustic view of Chicago because it’s what people like seeing in the Chicago Reader, where some of this stuff appeared before (also at Hack, his website, at which you’re invited to go take a look and revel in the everything’s-shit tone), but regardless: this is a bleak little book. Along with the text, the book features art from Samarov as well (that’s his work on the cover, too).

Anyway: it’s a book, and I’m mentioning it here because it’s about Chicago, which is the city where love comes from, and it’s certainly interesting to know about what transpires in cab garages, but this book is, but the reader has to listen to a hell of a lot of acid to get any notes of grace. And as an ending and preempt: I’m not advocating some Pollyana-ish anything, and everyone’s welcome to be as shitty and bitter as they choose, but when Samarov speaks of a woman getting in his cab with excitement—she got a part as a supernumerary in the opera and is thrilled—he pathetically finishes the scene as follows: “The sun is setting and my goals are more modest than hers. The cabdriver’s role is to play a bit part in others’ lives and be compensated accordingly.” (p.43) Ignoring entirely the fact that such an abstract statement could fucking apply to anyone in any public service job [teacher, waiter, bartender, banker, etc.], one wants, on reading the line, to just smack Samarov: grow up. Is he pissed that she didn’t ask him about his life? If so, he’s lying to either himself or the reader: elsewhere in the book he’s frustrated with people asking him questions about his life, totally confident they’re not really interested in him. So what’s the dour little piss sentence for? Again: I’m not looking for endless sunshine, but all Samarov seems capable of seeing or reporting on is bleakness, the worst of everything. Knock yourself out if that’s your bag.

Missed in 09 No 1 + 2

by Weston Cutter

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner.

This book wasn’t so much missed as almost sort of kept hidden + clutched. Do you remember how you felt about Marc Fisher’s incredible Something in the Air? That feeling one gets about books one enjoys more than is probably entirely healthy (for instance, see this recent NYTimes article)? This was how I ended up feeling about Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, which I got in like June of last year and here it is, February, and I’m only now letting the cat out of the bag (and I’m not the only one: check out the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award)(Also: big ups to Graywolf, and to their Corduroy-loved authors [Eula Biss, D. A. Powell, Stephen Burt] who got nods).

Here’s a potential theory: the big nonfiction doorstopping jobbies that are best and most fun to read are those whcih delicately and awesome balance the system being examined along with the personal stories that’ve attented to that system. So, in Fisher’s Something in the Air, it’s just as important that we understand how radio worked and spread as it is that we know what classic movie Jean Shepard wrote; or, in Finkel’s ever-astonishing The Good Soldiers, we’re given an equally clear view and glimpse of the steps and manuevers that keeps the soldiers in Iraq as we’re given of the soldiers themselves.

And so in a book like Perfecting Sound Forever, it’s equally critical that the reader understands the development of, say, the current sound of radio (maxed-out sound, insanely loud) as it is that we hear about, say, Edison and his opinions about cylinders vs. records. And we do get those stories, and a massive handful of other ones. We’re treated to the perhaps quackish guy who believes that digital music actually physically impairs and sickens its listeners (there’s a 99% chance you’re listening to digital music now, if you’re listening to musc), and to the dudes who ran the boards at the mastering studios when albums were still being made as coherent and cohesive things (think 1970′s-1980′s), and to an audiophile whose love of perfect fidelity has no dollar-amount limit.

There’s that word: fidelity, a word that’s been bastardized and manipulated for ages by the audio industry but which, in fact, just means “faithful to the original.” The other word that’s worth thinking lots and hard about re: audio? Analog. As much as this book exactly follows its subtitle (An Aural History of Recorded Music), Milner, with as light a touch as the real masters of this sort of thing (think McPhee), builds the story of recorded music’s history in a way that maximally allows and reveals the philosophical underpinnings which animate the machinery. That bit before, about Edison and cylinders vs. records? That was about his philosophy of which way recorded sound should go. That dude who’s pissed about digital music? Same thing.

That’s what’s easy to forget and what Milner does such a good job of making everyone remember: it’s not just by chance or automatic that we’re listening to mp3s, or before that CDs, or before that tapes, or before that records (the book to read about that sort of understanding and awareness is also Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget). The stuff we use, the stuff around us, ends up there by someone’s choice and hard work and (usually) unbelievably bull-headed stubbornness.

I know of no other book in which someone can learn so much so quickly and easily about such an interesting topic. I’m not kidding: this is not just one of last year’s best books, but one of the best books for this whole time period.

Unrest by Joanna Rawson

Oh Lord, what a book. Let me first let my colors be fully seen: I dig the hell out of lots of contemporary poetry, and the poet I care most about, or at least whose work I find most interesting and challenging and functionally useful and cool, is Jorie Graham (esp. her Never, which I’m hoping will, as time passes, be recognized as the masterwork it is). Why Graham? At least a few reasons. First, her lines are longer and more strangely-muscled than those of just about any other practicing poet. Don’t get me wrong: I dig the hell out of Zapruder and OKDavid and Jennifer Boyden and Hicok and etc., but by and large those folks aren’t writing serpentine lines that stretch and break and selectively cancel in quiet ways. Also: Graham’s the poet I know of who is most directly challenging/questioning ideas and notions of the author/reader split, and who is sometimes challenging those ideas and notions in terms of god and humans (which relationship, we all know, isn’t wildly different from an author/reader relationship). Anyway, there’s plenty more to say about that, but this isn’t about Graham.

What this is about is Joanna Rawson, whose Unrest is the book of poems I read last which, honestly, probably stuck with me more than any other. And I mean “stuck with” pretty literally: there are bees in this book, specifically a moment in which a whole swarm of bees swarms a common public item (I’m not gonna rob the joy—read the book), and, since August, every time I’ve seen that common public item, I’ve thought of bees. I’m not kidding.

But it’s more than that she’s written a book that sticks: like CD Wright, Joanna Rawson’s writing poems that seem out to shake the reader, out to at least force the reader to acknowledge that, yes, there’s a war going on, and that we presently live in a world in which one person’s ease is dependent on (at least) one other person’s suffering. In the stunningly gorgeous boot-kick of a poem “Kill-Box,” the narrator balances descriptions of her garden with the story of immigrants dying in a box car. For 10 pages you’re rapt, and let me here say, if Rawson ever trawls the web for comments: you’re a master, and this poem will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the very best poems from this time period.

What’s delicate and incredibly hard about what balancing social injustice issues with art is that, well…think of soy burgers. You want two things—the structure/shape/norms of one thing but with the benefit of another. How often do soy burgers taste good? Exactly. That’s about how often social justice poems work out. Which makes Rawson’s achievement all the more impressive: page after page she does this, lays down achingly beautiful art which has, at its heart, a dead-serious and steely-eyed consciousness.

It’s an incredible book, and, thankfully for all of us, books don’t expire. It came out in September 2009; if you get it today, you’re not even half a year late. Get to work.

Risk Delight

by Weston Cutter

So, the weighing in’s been going for at least a week—Richard Powers’s Generosity prompted a pretty glove-free and vicious razor-dashing from James Woods in the New Yorker, and, so far, the best refutation I’ve read is at the consistently phenomenal Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits…which piece, by Champion himself, earns a response from Woods, and the piece’s comments are interesting enough to head on over and check out. Regardless: this is simply table-setting, an establishment of dim facts that fade in the face of other, larger facts.

Facts: Richard Powers’s Generosity is one of the best books that we’ll see this year, and he’s now, with the still-echoing absence of DFWallace, one of the top two or three white male fiction writers now at work (though I should’ve posted more about this earlier, and have been tempted to for a bit, but I just keep feeling it’s too late to be timely—Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun is stunning. Stunning. Read the thing. If you’re at all like me, you think of Eggers and you think clever or funny or interesting—and he’s all those things, plus so inspirationally philanthropic it takes work not to feel like a slacker at all times when reading about him. But he’s also, through a through a ferociously good writer, and his sentences move like awesome machinery, and Zeitoun should be required reading for all Americans to have some better/freakier glimpse of post-Katrina New Orleans).

More facts: Ed Champion’s rant against Woods is that Woods doesn’t read for ideas, only for characters; Woods responds that, even if Powers’s novels are novels of ideas, the writing’s still shitty. You’ll have to read Powers’s stuff for yourself to decide for yourself about both points (I think Woods’s contention—that there are flat sentences—is at least worth acknowleding, if only so as not to be a horrible fingers-in-the-ears maniac; I think Champion’s pretty correct that Woods doesn’t dig novels of ideas; let’s recall that this is the guy who propped Wallace and Z. Smith up as the harbingers of contemporary doom). Yet more facts: I’d argue strongly that Powers writes for a group we’ll just have to admit might be called nerds.

Who do I mean by nerds? I mean me; I mean, likely, you (anyone willing to take time to read book reviews on a tiny blog has to at least entertain the nerdy possibility). I mean people for whom the movement of thought is a satisfying sensual experience—were the folks who cry and/or shiver at certain stuff by Wallace Stevens, for instance. This gets dicey quick, because Champion and Woods are nice figureheads for the two sides of this argument—idea vs. character—but there’s a sort of third way, and that way offers a satisfaction that’s a conjunction of both idea and character.

Before we get further, let’s just go ahead and tackle the room’s elephant: Powers writes sentimental sentences sometimes, yes. If Woods chooses to see those exclusively as simply bad writing, more power to him, but I think that’s a shittily missed point. Powers writes enough cathedrally gorgeous and arching sentences to hip any reader to the fact that he’s not, when he writes some of the more sentimental stuff (think of the dialogue, for instance, toward the end of Three Farmers), writing like that because he’s incapable of writing any other way. In other words: what Woods is choosing to see as bad writing is, I think, flawed. The truth is, Powers’s sentimental stuff is basically of a piece with Dickens’s sentimental stuff, and if Woods wants to get into all that, by all means, let him start it up. But the sentences that Woods wants to focus on and wrestle to the ground sort of miss the point, and Champion’s awesome and astute defense of Powers as an ideational writer also, I think, doesn’t full-throatedly enough defend what Powers does, is doing, has been for more than 20 years doing.

Because what he’s doing is making emotionally satisfying stuff for intellectuals—meaning nerds, of course. Meaning us. Lorrie Moore‘s puns operate on a similar sort of principle—you get an aesthetic satisfaction from her work, from how pretty and well-made her sentences and stories are, and then you get puns on top of that as, like, icing or something, little intellectual cherry-ringers every page or so. Poetry’s where it’s easier to find this stuff, and the folks I can think of who do this best are Jorie Graham (especially her first few books…though maybe all the way through Never [skipping Swarm, obv]) and Wallace Stevens, both of whom load up their lines with great ideational stuff that’s satisfying at an intellectual level and but which also delivers the emotional goods (read Graham’s last three poems in Never, for instance, and try to avoid getting the chills, especially in the homeless woman one). I can think of few fiction writers who are remotely capable of doing stuff like this; certainly there are great things being written (hello DeLillo and McCracken and the perfect Elizabeth Hay), but nobody I’ve seen is getting emotional about intellectual stuff like how Powers is (Wallace wasn’t either, really: his work was intellectual in a deeply personal, almost solipsistic way; the smarts were clearly there, but the emotional stuff was usually felt as a result of stopping the over-intellectualization).

The point is actually a line from Jack Gilbert: we must risk delight. Powers’s stuff—the stuff that strikes Woods as bad or flat writing—is actually, I contend, stuff that, fine, may not have the firecrackery brilliance Powers is eminently capable of, but which is emphatically from and of a place of intellectual delight. That’s Powers’s real power: his stuff’s largely about smart people feeling joy and having fun from/with/because of ideas. If that puts it beyond the realm of what Woods is willing to concede as great writing, that’s fine–he’s got his tastes. But, for your own sake, don’t take his word on Powers, especially on Generosity, without at least reading the thing first.

Because it is a great and fun and smart and satisfying book—satisfying in the way only art which respects your intelligence can be (remember how good it feels to walk from, say, a Charlie Kaufman movie? How you don’t feel like you just got peed on by the director? How it feels to be respected as a thinking and autonomous human, capable of making connection between various abstractions at different levels?). Russell and Thassa and Candace—they’re fine characters, and various scenes from this book will lodge in your gray matter for a long time, I’m guessing (lights out Chicago, for instance). More than fine characters, though: they’re not simply there for us to observe and feel toward and for: they’re there, on more than one level, to act as mirros—to help us feel more toward and for and about ourselves, about our own world. If giving a reader new ways in which to feelingly think about the world isn’t the greatest act of art there is, I’d very much appreciate anyone’s insight into what might be. Generosity is exactly what it claims to be, and such, such an act of it.

Three In Brief

by Weston Cutter

Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry 

 

            If you read the NYTimes or Slate or, really, if you pay attention to literary stuff, you already know that this book’s out. Maybe you’ve seen Secretary, the movie based on a Gaitskill story that came out several years back. Maybe you’ve read Gaitskill’s stuff in the glossies, or read her last novel Veronica, which seemingly everyone loved tons. I don’t know. What’s happened now is that Pantheon’s published her latest collection and the stories within are, as usual, disturbingly good—hard to read in the best ways, giving a feeling like you’re wrestling with something intractable. She writes better than most writers in any genre, and she’s got an unsettlingly sharp eye for weakness which’d be just gutpunchingly wrecking if she didn’t also have an enormous capacity for something like pity or empathy. I feel like every short story collection gets praised for showing the flawed but ultimately luminuous nature of life, and boilerplate like that’s probably the best anyone can do in the face of Gaitskill’s stories: she’s dazzling and tough and true and very very very good.

 

Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned 

 

            Along the same lines as the latest from Gaitskill, it seems like everyone and their uncle’s talking about Tower’s debut collection (ahem, NYTimes Sunday Book Review cover). And, again, along the same lines as  the latest from Gaitskill, I can’t see how I can add much to the already din-like hurrah about this book. I don’t, for the record, find it quite the dazzle everywhere else seems to claim it is—Tower’s fiction’s good, but I’d rather read his nonfiction any day of the week—but it’s a solid and engaging read, and, sentence-for-sentence, there are stories in here (“Down Through the Valley” and “Door in Your Eye” especially) that are knock-down good, as good as anything else you’d see in Tin House or The New Yorker or elsewhere. And the title story: yes, it’s really good; read it and enjoy yr vikings.

 

D. A. Powell, Chronic

 

            I’ll absolutely admit that I couldn’t get my head even a little around Cocktails, Powell’s last book (from 2004). I’ll also admit that Chronic took like a week and a half, two weeks, of sitting and reading and looking crossly at and wondering aloud just what the hell it was doing before, somehow, the thing just opened, early-spring-flower-like. I can’t find a soapbox big enough to stand on to shout about this, but, honest to God, Chronic might be the best hugely-complex book of poetry I’ve read since the last Jorie Graham or C. D. Wright—he’s that good, that complex and gnarly. Honestly? The best thing to do is buy the book but don’t read it right away. Treat the book like you’d treat some new strange animal: give it time and air and space for awhile. Dip into it for a week or so, two weeks (I realize I’m advising doing what I did, so, yes, I’ll admit to feeling like I got something significant from this book because of the approach). Keep yr distance. But then, after you’ve gotten used to the book in your life, sit with it for two hours, or three, and read it through and through, and just be flabbergastedly dazzled. It’s a magnificent book which contains, yes Whitman echoes, multitudes.

Some Notes on C. D. Wright

by Weston Cutter

 

: This might be one of the most aching books of poetry I’ve read in a long, long time. Aching in the sense of almost, an infinite almost through the pages of the book. As in: twelve of the poems in here (by my count there are sixteen poems total, if you count Rising, Falling, Hovering as a single poem (meaning each of the halves get counted together as one poem (this entire digression’s a good example of what C.D. Wright’s fantastic at not ever doing, which is getting bogged down in tiny incremental shit like boundaries and edges))) begin with the word “like.” Sample titles: “Like Having a Light at Your Back You Can’t See but You Can Still Feel” (there are two of those); “Like the Hour of Our Perfection”; “Like the Ghost of a Carrier Pigeon”. As in: much of the poetry in here revolves around things being similar-but-not-quite. 

(Which might be worth taking a moment to talk about, since Wright’s a pretty phenomenal example—maybe the instigator—of a sort of style that’s getting more and more prevalent, the almost-almost-almost thing. I’m sure this is far too reductive and simple, but poetry at the moment—good, demanding, rigorous poetry—seems sort of split between camps in terms of how poetry derives its energy. Old Dean Young stuff (and his minions, I suppose, or whoever else is like him) gets its energy by working in the realm of causality. From memory, and from one of my all time favorite poems, “And because her face has finally flown/ from the faces of strangers…perhaps now her accusations are done.” It’s one read out of at least a few possible, but certainly there’s a reading there that DYoung’s saying that the woman’s accusations are done because her face has flown. It’s impossible, we know—it’s literally impossible, what he’s describing, but it’s emotionally sensical and great and resonant. Let’s call DYoung and Co. That Group. Then, the This Group, of which C.D. Wright’s a huge contributor (plus also (to some degree) J. Graham (read the new one read the new one read the new one—she’s so great; we’ll have a review of Sea Change sooner or later), also M. Harvey, and maybe, further back, S. Messer (has everyone read her? Please, read her Bandit Letters). The This Group, from what I can tell, sets things near each other without offering anything like causality but proximity to create energy. This is probably all bullshit. I’m making it up as I type right now. Anyway—it seemed right a second ago).

 

: And so the ache of the book comes out of something like proximity. There are two poems in Rising, Falling, Hovering which have a (1) and a (2) version (I’m loathe to call them first/second or before/after or anything. The (1) and (2) seem entirely denotations for clarity, not numerical ordering or anything), and both poems repeat like half the lines from the first iteration to the second. Meaning what? Meaning that the poems’ are very finely differentiated things, and maybe the twice-told poems in the book are to be to be taken together, a flash/shadow type thing. It’s a thought.

 

: Yes, there’s overt politics in this book. Yes, it’s the sort of politics you’d expect from someone

1. Who lives in a ‘blue’ state

2. Who has a conscience.

 

: Wright might be more agile a poet than any writer working right now. She’s got the balls of a burglar in here: she’s some crazed falconer and I don’t want my notion of C.D. Wright disabused: I imagine her with a magic wand, turning form into a frog, a butterfly, a stone, a pencil. The 50+ pages that make up the title poem? Nothing anyone could call a uniform style throughout, other than the style of urgency and a sort of frankness that seems heartless until you realize it’s nothing but heart.

 

: Insanely powerful, just perfectly written lines.

 

“Between scattered showers and a power outage, this and this happened.” (“Like Things That Might Go On in Infinite Dimensions”).

 

“One has a sense of something out there that needs saving / and one ought to attach the buckle / to a heavy-gauge wire and pull him through // waking up knowing this much is not the hard part” (“End Thoughts”)

 

Those are two pages at random. There are plenty more.

 

: Yes, the title poem. I don’t know how to touch it. Have you seen Picasso’s Guernica? If so: how would you describe it to someone who hadn’t seen it? Q: how many poems have you read by contemporary writers that are longer than 10 pages—not book-length poems, mind you, but single, cohesive poems that range mapwild for 50 pages? Jimi Hendrix’s “Bold As Love,” the title track from Axis: Bold as Love was once described as being a description of color to a blind man. Some similar analogy should apply here. For a pretty close and good reading, check out Roger Mitchell’s write-up of that poem.

 

: Here’s a thought: Rising, Falling, Hovering might be the most patriotic book of poetry published this year. Bloody patriotism. Honest, dreadful patriotism. Why do I, a 29 year old white man, feel guilty and dumb even writing the word “patriotic”? Maybe because there haven’t been enough books by C.D. Wright recently.

It’s right there, on the back of the book, it’s the last line on the back jacket (and a line from the title poem):

“What is said has been said before                       This is no time for poetry.”

And that that line is on the back of a book of poetry is somehow neither simply clever (if it’s no time for poetry, is Copper Canyon trying to get us to not buy the book?) nor a bullshit head-fakey claim (Oh, I’m so ironic, it’s no time for poetry…but really, it is). Not for a second do I claim to know what the line means: it’s a line in a poem, and it means something in the poem that it doesn’t mean in the same way on the back of the book. That said: I’d argue strongly that if right now’s not a time that we consider ‘for poetry’ it’s because we’ve fucked ourselves in terms of poetry. Poetry’s ether, is the laughing shapeshifter: poetry’ll do what we need it to. And if “This is no time for poetry” has any resonance with anyone who might look at this book and nod sagely and say indeed, I beg you: change your mind. This is time for poetry. Specifically: this is time for C. D. Wright’s poetry. Please, please: read this book. Buy ten copies. Send all your money to Copper Canyon for publishing such great writers over and over again (C.D. Wright’s just the tip of the iceberg: W. S. Merwin, Hayden Carruth, Matthew Zapruder…the list is just mind-bendingly beautiful), and keep this book close. If poetry’s got any service—debateable—it’s that it offers us words (perhaps crazy, perhaps nonsense words, but still: words. Order) for the wind in our heads. And I’m guessing that there are plenty of us, all over the place, who could use a dose of C. D. Wright’s words for help with the wind in our heads.